Blogs

Earlier this week, I used some data from our traffic logs – courtesy of Statcounter – to make a point regarding the importance of fixing the shell. There are many such points that can be made, but there’s another one today that validates something I’ve believed for some time now but have had difficulty convincing others of.

As many of you know, package management is a personal hobby horse of mine. Merely bringing it up is the proverbial red rag to a bull. For a couple of years now, I’ve beencampaigning for and agitating on behalf of package management in those systems that lack it, and standardization amongst those that have it already. Some of this lobbying has been in public, some has been behind the scenes, but it’s all driven by the belief that package management systems can lower barriers to entry not just for technology acquisition but ongoing maintenance and security patching. For a variety of reasons, however, my suggestions typically fall on deaf ears, although there’s been a significant uptick in interest in recent months.

But just to drive home the point – to validate my contention, as promised above – I thought I’d drop in a quick datapoint from today’s traffic to this space:

The name I’ve redacted? One of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street. I know the Solaris folks are thinking and working on this, and hopefully this will give them additional incentive to tackle that problem.